Genesis 15:7-16 “Then He said to him, "I am the Lord, who brought you out of Ur of the Chaldeans, to give you this land to inherit it." … (13) Then He said to Abram: "Know certainly that your descendants will be strangers in a land that is not theirs, and will serve them, and they will afflict them four hundred years. (14) And also the nation whom they serve I will judge; afterward they shall come out with great possessions. (15) Now as for you, you shall go to your fathers in peace; you shall be buried at a good old age. (16) But in the fourth generation they shall return here, for the iniquity of the Amorites is not yet complete.”
In the above quoted passage of scripture God once again confirms the truth to us that He extends grace to nations to repent of their wicked ways by not judging them straight away, for God revealed to Abraham that the nations that were at that time inhabiting the land of Israel, had not yet reached the point of no return. For God revealed that the sins of the Amorite nation were not yet complete. In other words, God would continue to speak to those nations and pronounce various judgements on those nations to get them to repent of their ways, but eventually the time would come when God would pronounce their final judgement, thus allowing Israel to conquer them and remove them from being sovereign nations in the earth. It is interesting to note God’s timeline on this issue, for God speaks about these nations only reaching their final judgement four hundred years into the future. And so we see that God is extremely patient in giving nations time to repent of their ways. Sadly, because nations are not judged immediately when they sin against God, many take that to mean that either God excuses their behaviour or that He does not require an account for their actions. Nevertheless this scripture plainly reveals to us that it is guaranteed that every nation that chooses to consistently reject God’s norms, will eventually be judged by Him and thus cease to exist as a nation in the earth.
Michael E.B. Maher
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